Medium density languages
Medium density languages is a term I first heard used by Will Lewis to describe certain languages that linguists don't pay much attention to. I don't know if the word can be attributed to him or not, but I haven't heard it used elsewhere. (Update: it seems to be used in some academic circles, especially computational linguistics?)
The basic idea of a medium-density language is that it has enough speakers or the right socio-linguistic situation to be in no perceived threat of immediate (like critical languages) or long-term (like low-density languages) extinction, but not enough speakers or the right sort of socio-linguistic situation to be a "world language" (high-density)—and as such, linguists simply ignore it, or worse, aren't even interested in it. Medium-density languages also suffer from an acute lack of materials of interest/use/relevance to linguists, which may be either part of the cause for them to be considered medium-density, or just an effect of it.
The main problem with establishing this term is that number of speakers seems not to be the primary criterion. A language may be considered high-density merely if there is a large enough community of native-speaker linguists (such as is the case with Finnish, Norwegian, and Hebrew, despite low numbers of native speakers, and maybe also with Hungarian, and possibly Turkish, where the higher number of native speakers doesn't help), or if there has been work done by a certain number of linguists who work on the language in the linguistic literature because it's somehow "easily accessible". Some low-density languages have especially accessible materials because linguists have paid so much attention to them.
Some other ideas for criteria for establishing a language as medium-density might be:
- the existence or vivality of internet activity in the language, such as a wikipedia in the language (see also my Central Asia wikipedia graphs);
- the existence of popular media (local television, music, music videos, etc) in the language;
- interest in studying the language outside of communities where it's spoken;
- ...
Examples
- Finnish is a high-density language. There are about 6 million native speakers, but lots of linguists have paid attention to the language, and there are a number of native-speaker linguists. Compare to Tatar, which has about 8 million native speakers, but's medium-density.
- Kazakh is a medium-density language. There are about 12 million native speakers, but essentially no "Western" linguists among them. Existing materials on the language are of poor quality (with some early-/mid-Soviet-era exceptions, though the focus often isn't of interest to modern western linguists), and data linguists might be interested in is difficult for them to obtain. Compare to Greek, which has roughly the same number of native speakers, but which is high-density (native-speaker linguists, decent materials, accessible data).
